There has been attempted to use a human motion with the body or hand(s), i.e., a so-called gesture in a man-machine interface. As an example of technologies for such gesture recognition, there is a gesture recognition apparatus that recognizes a gesture using a movement locus of an object.
This gesture recognition apparatus extracts an attention point from an object domain corresponding to a user's hand extracted from a plurality of image frames taken at different times. Then, the gesture recognition apparatus determines a moving direction of the object domain on the basis of a moving direction of the extracted attention point, and detects a movement locus of the user's hand using transition data obtained by lining up results of the determination of the moving direction in chronological order.
[Patent document 1] Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2011-76255
However, the above-mentioned conventional technology has a problem that a motion that a user does not intend is incorrectly recognized as a gesture as will be described below.
Namely, when a user repeatedly makes a gesture, the above gesture recognition apparatus may incorrectly recognize a preliminary action for repeating the gesture as a gesture. For example, when the user repeatedly makes a gesture of moving his hand from right to left, it is not only the user's intended motion of moving his hand from right to left that is recognized as a gesture. That is to say, a preliminary action of moving the hand, which has moved to left, back to right to make the next gesture may also be recognized as a gesture.